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On the London Stage, Tragedy, From Kings on Down

LONDON — The London theater is in a fearsome mood these days, whether on large stages or small.

Indeed, during a recent week of playgoing, I learned that goodness is nothing more than another word for cowardice, that same-sex affections are likely to end in something far bloodier than tears, and that even a pet guinea pig isn’t immune from the brutishness coursing through the capital’s stages of late.

The best-known of these scenarios has arrived courtesy of Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary of Shakespeare — they were born the same year — who may not quite possess his colleague’s unequivocal lyricism but who also knew a thing or two about the price paid for kingship gone awry.

“Edward II” remains one of Marlowe’s best-known texts, and it is often paired in conversation (and sometimes in performance) with “Richard II,” Shakespeare’s eternally rhapsodic yet mournful history play. But while the Royal Shakespeare Company primes “Richard II” for a new production later this fall, the National has got in first with an “Edward II” that is sure to divide spectators on every front but one — the superb performance of the fast-ascending actor John Heffernan in the title role.

In fact, the modish approach taken by the director Joe Hill-Gibbins, marking his National debut, won’t surprise those familiar with his esteemed track record at the Young Vic, where Mr. Hill-Gibbins directed two separate accounts of “The Changeling,” the Jacobean tragedy that occupies much the same take-no-prisoners landscape as “Edward II.”

But whereas that staging placed the audience behind netting and allowed the actors as required to cover one another with varying kinds of glop (chocolate! jam!), his “Edward” blurs the distinction between theater and film by presenting sizable swaths of the action on screens that flank the Olivier auditorium.

Sometimes, the conceit makes perfect sense: In a narrative rife with backstairs intrigue, why not grant us access to the goings-on backstage? At other times, it feels like a distraction too far.

It’s difficult to argue too much, however, with a tactic that keeps playgoers apprised at every turn of Mr. Heffernan’s keenly sensitized portrayal, Edward’s downward spiral made doubly plain by scene titles informing us of the grim trajectory of the piece as it is happening. Even acting behind a beard in what must be the most hirsute production in memory, the actor awakens us to Edward’s grievous surrender to the sleep-deprived torment that soon after leads to his gruesome demise.

A benchmark work in the canon of gay-themed drama, “Edward II” spends much of its first half obsessing about the banishment of Edward’s lowly beloved, Gaveston, who is no sooner expelled from view than the king is demanding his return. Playing what amounts to a human yo-yo, the London-based American actor Kyle Soller gets to act in his own accent — a clever way of separating Gaveston out from the array of nobles and the like who have no time for him. (Mr. Soller was an Olivier nominee this past spring for his West End performance in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”)

Mr. Soller’s various entrances also help lend an intimacy to the largest of the National’s three venues while presumably functioning as their own aerobics class. This is the Elizabethan theater at once juiced up and in your face. Traditionalists will be dismayed, but the rapt matinee crowd among whom I sat one recent afternoon took it in their stride.

Photo

John Heffernan in the title role of Christopher Marlowe’s ‘‘Edward II,’’ with Kyle Soller as the king’s favorite, Gaveston. The National Theatre production is directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins.Credit
Johan Persson

Across town at the Royal Court, the primary theater for new writing has got its new season off to a scarcely less contentious start. “The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas” — Gorge in this instance is pronounced as if it were George — springs from the febrile imagination of Dennis Kelly, the British playwright who won a Tony in June for his book for the musical “Matilda.”

Whereas that show focuses on a young girl blessed with supernatural powers, Mr. Kelly’s new play tells of the unforgiving übermensch of its title, who learns early on to discard anything resembling goodness if he is to make it in the carnivorous world at large. Nor is the word übermensch invoked lightly: The play had its world premiere last year in a separate production in Frankfurt.

Court regulars may feel as if they have been here before. After all, this is by my reckoning the third play this year at this address to remind us of the depredations wrought on society by capitalism — an ongoing irony in light of the theater’s perch amid one of the most moneyed parts of town.

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And yet, Mr. Kelly and his astute director, Vicky Featherstone, deserve credit for very neatly reversing a truism of theater. We’ve long been led to believe that plays operate according to the principle of “show, don’t tell,” but such is not the case here. In fact, the most arresting part of the evening is the first half-hour or so, during which the seven-strong cast pass Gorge’s story among one another, the ensemble arrayed in a row of chairs downstage.

It’s only later, once the actual drama kicks in, that we want far greater specificity and detail than Mr. Kelly’s thesis seems to permit. Even then, however, one is transfixed by the hollow-eyed courage of Tom Brooke in the daunting title role of a Faustian figure who achieves all that he could have ever wished for and yet ends the evening a broken, isolated man.

After these two lengthy quasi epics, the hourlong “Fleabag,” at the Soho Theatre’s 95-seat studio space through Sunday, comes as a restorative short jolt to the system. The author, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is also the sole performer in a family affair that finds the actress’s sister, Isobel, as the expert sound designer of a piece in which aural suggestions of the world beyond are crucial to the psychic collapse on view before us.

Much of the monologue is explosively funny, not least when the beautiful Ms. Waller-Bridge arches her long, riveting neck to drop into one impersonation or another of the (usually luckless) personages in her character Fleabag’s orbit. But it’s not long before we realize that the piece is as much a critique of Fleabag in libidinous freefall as it is an often hilarious survey of mating rituals and chance encounters in the London of today. (And let us not forget that guinea pig mentioned above.)

Ms. Waller-Bridge all but stole last season’s West End revival of Noël Coward’s “Hay Fever,” playing Sorel Bliss. This time around, she is the show, so there’s nothing there for her to steal; the audience sits in her thrall from the outset.